Ya Nass

Description

After John Lurie, Tom Waits, Neil Young, RZA, and Mulatu Astatke, Yasmine Hamdan is the latest artist to contribute to the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch's next film! A role in Jim Jarmusch's new film (to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival next May) and an original score for the Comédie Française: the most Parisian of Lebanese artists will be busy on all fronts in spring 2013. Written and produced in collaboration with Marc Collin (Nouvelle Vague), Yasmine Hamdan's first solo album (released confidentially in May 2012 in France on the Kwaidan label) has been thoroughly reworked for its international release on the Crammed Discs label. Featuring new cover art and a new title ("Ya Nass"), it now includes five new songs, including "Hal" (which Yasmine performs in Jim Jarmusch's new film). Yasmine has been considered an underground icon throughout the Arab world since her early days with Soapkills, the emblematic duo she founded in Beirut, one of the first indie/electronic groups to emerge in the Middle East, whose music accompanied the days and nights of the young art scene that flourished after the war in Lebanon. After moving to Paris, Yasmine collaborated with Mirwais (formerly of Taxi Girl, Madonna's album producer), with whom she founded the ephemeral project Y.A.S and recorded "Arabology." Yasmine then collaborated with CocoRosie. While the vocal styles that Yasmine reappropriates are clearly linked to the traditions of Arabic music (which she approaches intuitively and unconventionally), the song structures and arrangements are nevertheless very far from these codes. They could be described as a kind of mutant and elegant electro-pop folk, which mysteriously emerged somewhere around the Persian Gulf... with acoustic guitars, vintage synthesizers, and inspired atmospheres... not to mention Yasmine's fascinating voice and its multiple registers. Yasmine will therefore appear in Jim Jarmusch's new film, "Only Lovers Left Alive," a vampire story, alongside Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddlestone, and John Hurt. She plays... herself, and performs a song she wrote for the occasion ("Hal").